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Rain.
Not the heavy kind of rain, but the finest fresh drops, as if a water-mist; so light that it longs to reach the ground. Merely the idea of rain, really, the flavour of it. Like looking through a fogged up windowpane.
Looking at your captain.
She is standing a short way away, warm and dry, away from the moss and the mist and the mud of the creek. Standing in the trodden grass beneath a long-leafed tree, branches trembling with their blushing fruit.
She calls out, ‘Seven.’ Motions you over with a flutter of the hand.
A soft, sudden wind picks up the leaves, turning the green silver and gold, bespangled in the air, flicking and shivering their watery drops.
This whole strange world seems to flash its sparkle, as you trace a path through the raindrop grass to your captain’s side.
‘Aren’t they divine?’ she says, eyes on the fruits, round and eager. ‘We have to taste one. They’re so ripe and ready, almost falling off the branch.’
She stretches up on her tiptoes to pluck a single ripened fruit. Her uniform shifts about her slim arms, about her slim backside and hips.
Feet firmly to the ground again, she straightens it—three smooth strokes of her palm—though the left sleeve stays bunched, just above her wrist.
You watch intently as she takes her first fat mouthful, listening to the small sounds of pleasure she makes as she eats. Listening to the far-away croaking of silky creatures, a pastel sky scattered with gentle birdsong and gentle clouds.
Lazy droplets of juice drip down her fingers and onto her black cuff.
Eventually, she offers you a taste. Holds the fruit close to your lips. You can make out a sliverish sheen from its delicate dusting of downy hairs, the marks of her teeth scarring the pale flesh. Prunus persica, you identify at last—an Earth peach.
How curious, you think at once. How curious that such a plant should be growing in the Delta Quadrant, so far away from its native planet.
How illogical.
Only now, do you discover that you’re inexplicably bereft of a tricorder.
‘You trust me, don’t you, Seven?’
You hesitate.
She is right, of course. You do trust her. Implicitly.
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Show me.’
Your lips press the fruit’s skin. Take an ample bite. Plump flesh gives easily under the attentions of your mouth. The flavour is strong, lush and juicy and redolent. Slightly warmer than you had expected, crushed between your teeth and tongue.
Fast and short she breathes her little breaths as she watches you mouth the fruit. The not-quite-rain has stopped for now, and she is lit up by the planet’s star; the late-afternoon glow catches colours in her hair and those gentle freckles of the nose and cheeks.
‘I want you to describe it to me,’ she says, absorbed. ‘What does it taste like?’
A memory of the Captain bathed in holographic firelight. The Captain frustrated with you, jaw clenched, eyes bright, words hard. The Captain laughing at your joke. The Captain playing Velocity, mopping clean her sharp-smelling sweat. The Captain eating breakfast in the mess hall, chin sticky and lips dripping.
You swallow.
‘Sweet. And warm. It reminds me of you.’
‘Yes? In what way?’
‘The hairs on your skin, your cheek…’ Your own voice feels strange to the ear, sing-song and echoey. ‘…Your scent… you… I am uncertain…’
Breath low. ‘Come here.’
The Captain touching her fingers to your arm. The Captain toe-to-toe with your Queen. The Captain, small and fierce and fire on the bridge. The Captain, weary under pale starlight. The Captain in the Delta Flyer, asking you to come home.
The Captain is standing very close now. One hand rests between your shoulder blades, the other cradles your naked face. The touch of her is velvet, rhythmic and red.
She presses the prick of her thumb to your lips, until you open your mouth for her. You take the finger inside, sucking. Feel her rub against your tongue in small concentric circles. Thick with juice and sweetness and need.
‘Can’t you feel it?’ Her words taste hot. Intoxicating.
You stand very still for a moment, trying to read your own sensations. Increasingly, there spreads an intense kind of weightlessness, as if you are within a non-gravitational field. A sense of floating towards each other. Floating into the ether.
You are lighter than air, you are heavy as a stone shaped by the stream, revelling in the heat of the star at your back, feeling the slippery nibble of the fish’s kisses, you are swimming through mouth and throat and sinew, burrowing and worming, hungry, sticky with spores, you are moved by the wind, riding high with a breeze, in the voluptuous rainclouds, thundering mad above the treetops, you are at the hackles of a beast, the foot of a beetle, on the wing of a moth, you are pollen from the anther, dust from a star, cosmic and dreaming and dying and reborn, you are timeless!
Time must pass?
Internal chronometer—unresponsive.
The Captain’s body is sprawled atop your own in the damp grass. You are dizzy and warm. Perspiring a little. Aroused.
Human sexual activity. Copulation?
‘Lovemaking?’ she says, giggling (you had not believed yourself to speak aloud). ‘I could have explained it to you, we’re only kissing.’
Oh—indeed.
‘This kissing you… produces a tingling sensation. Behind my eyes and between my legs.’
‘That’s good, Seven. Means they’re good kisses.’ Two heartbeats. ‘You’re enjoying it?’
‘Yes, Captain.’
She hums pleasantly. A tongue-tip charts its course between your facial implants. Air across your lashes. Her kisses falling over you like rain.
You presume it incorrect human etiquette to kiss your captain, really.
‘Kiss me again,’ she says, in any case.
‘Yes, Captain.’
A whisper, ‘Like this…’
You let yourself mould to her touch, so you are pressed more firmly along the curves and bones of her. Her body is very hot through your thin dermaplastic coverings. Her mouth is hot as well, and wet and distinctly exciting. Electric. The small tongue licks. You feel her all over. Feel till the rich smell of her floods your body to bursting: that same floral fruit and something like coffee underneath, the freckled taste to her skin.
You are floating once more. And flying and spinning and running.
You run the fields from length to length, like fingers through her silken hair. Girls rolling down the lustrous hills until you forget you are girls. You are soft ripened fruit, bruised and brushing together, lying atop the cool wet grasses. Growing wild beyond time’s deep-dark earth, buried in your tenderness. Warm and nothing together.
Nothing at all. You are nothing at all.
Nothing much, a tiny thing. Fair-haired and small. Feeling the ruffle of silk against your little head. The powdery-sweet of amber scent perfuming the pillows, the quilt, the striped cotton sheets.
A mother’s kiss upon your forehead but some long-forgotten dream.
‘Annika?’ Her lilting voice drifts as music through the air.
‘I have been Seven of Nine for as long as I can remember.’
‘All right…’ A different voice. Stronger, huskier. Loving. ‘Sweet dreams.’
Those feathered bedclothes shift up against your pinking cheeks. Light and happy and home. You snuggle closer. She loves you, you realise.
She loves me.
Your eyes flutter and blur to the night.
Overhead your grassy bed, glow-in-the-dark constellations, stars and planets and solar systems, comets shooting by the ceilinged sky. That thick green eye of the moon, half-closed and watching and Borg, crept by cloudy grey fingers in the low of the land.
Stars in her midnight eyes.
‘Silly girl, you fell asleep.’ The Captain rises above your prone figure on her hands and knees, a smile like moonshine. It is evening now. Dark sky and lush cloud. The ground is crisp and dry, but it smells a lot like recent rains.
‘Borg do not sleep,’ you reply with a start, sit up. Your backside looks numb.
‘My Borg does.’ She’s teasing and fingering your fat sleep-swollen lip (those long, slender fingers). ‘Does my Seven dream too? Tell me.’ Her pupils look big and blown in the half-light.
She is beautiful like this, you see now. Beautiful eyes, beautiful fingers. You feel breathless.
‘Tell me what it’s like,’ she begs.
A short pause.
‘Like a warm, sweet Earth fruit,’ you decide.
‘Mmmm. Come on, sleepy, peachy girl, it’s time to go back—beam out.’
‘Yes, Captain.’ Kiss me again, Captain.
That cool-breathed night unspools forth, dissolving between lilac shimmer and replicating, reconstituted nanoprobes.
Twin mouths come and part.
Both of you lie on the bed.
Separate greyed-beige beds. Supine. Ribboned lights threading above you, haloed white pops on the bionic eye, rainbow ripples and streams. Sickly sickbay lights.
Curious, you do not recall why your bodies made their transport here.
Nor why the Captain has presently disappeared from her bed.
It is disconcerting, to find that you cannot stretch yourself to reach her. Cannot stretch yourself across the space of that tight, bright room.
You remain stilled and silent.
‘…that’s an order, Doctor…’
The icy surge of a hypospray bites at your throat, blooms free through your fast-flowing blood. Your fast-flying heart wanting her utterly. Wanting your captain utterly. Aching all over with it.
Aching with the loving of her.
And yet, these leadened limbs of yours stubbornly “will not comply”.
Unacceptable. Systems malfunction?
Diagnostic—unavailable.
All at once, you are far too heavy, far too metal, far too Borg.
You wish to be soft and light again in your captain’s arms.
Instead, you feel dark and full and green. Not quite human. Those bright rainbowed lights lost, replaced with thin quick-licking electrical circuits, slender fingertips of energy. Tasting cold and sparking a little beneath the eyelids, beneath the body’s surface. Emitting a faint positronic charge.
This is entirely familiar now, to Seven. This sensation. This blissful millisecond between her and unconsciousness.
She recognises, she remembers.
‘Regeneration cycle complete,’ signals the ship’s computer.
Seven detaches from the alcove, alert and awake. Steps down.
Spies the sliver of light from the door, like a new crescent moon. Whisper of figure. Then they’re gone; only the gloom of cargo bay two and that dim cybernetic glow.
Only her.
Alone. Seven of Nine alone with her thoughts.
Borg do not sleep, she posits.
Borg do not dream?